COSMIC CASANOVA
THIS TIME t was five weeks out from Base Planet before the symptoms
became acute. On the last trip it had taken only a month; I was not
certain whether the difference was due to advancing age or to something
the dietitians had put into my food capsules. Or it could merely have
been that I was busier; the arm of the galaxy I was scouting was
heavily populated, with stars only a couple of light-years apart, so I
had little time to brood over the girls I'd left behind me. As soon as
one star had been classified, and the automatic search for planets had
been completed, it was time to head for the next sun. And when, as
happened in about one case out of ten, planets did turn up, I'd be
furiously busy for several days seeing that Max, the ship's electronic
computer, got all the information down on his tapes.
Now, however, I was through this densely packed region of space, and it
sometimes took as much as three days to get from sun to sun. That was
time enough for Sex to come tiptoeing aboard the ship, and for the
memories of my last leave to make the months ahead look very empty
indeed.
Perhaps I had overdone it, back on Diadne V, while my ship was being
reprovisionedand I was supposed to be resting between missions. But a
survey scout spends eighty percent of his time alone in space, and
human nature being what it is, he must be expected to make up for lost
time. I had not merely done that; I'd built up considerable credit for
the future though not, it seemed, enough to last me through this
trip.
Pirst, I recalled wistfully, there had been Helene. She was blonde,
cuddly, and compliant, though rather unimaginative. We had a fine time
together until her husband came back from his mission; he was extremely
decent about it but pointed out, reasonably enough, that Helene would
now have very little time for other engagements. Fortunately, I had
already made contact with Iris, so the hiatus was negligible.
Now Iris was really something. Even now, it makes me squirm to think
of her. When that affair broke up for the simple reason that a man has
to get a little sleep sometime I swore off women for a whole week. Then
I came across a touching poem by an old Earth writer named John Donne
he's worth looking up, if you can read Primitive English which reminded
me that time lost could never be regained.
How true, I thought, so I put on my spaceman's uniform and wandered
down to the beach of Diadne V's only sea. There was need to walk no
more than a few hundred meters before I'd spotted a dozen
possibilities, brushed off several volunteers, and signed up Natalie.
That worked out pretty well at first, until Natalie started objecting
to Ruth (or was it Kayo.
I can't stand girls who think they own a man, so I blasted off after a
rather difficult scene that was quite expensive in crockery. This left
me at loose ends for a couple of days; then Cynthia came to the rescue
and but by now you'll have gotten the general idea, so I won't bore you
with details.
These, then, were the fond memories I started to work back through
while one star dwindled behind me and the next flared up ahead. On
this trip I'd deliberately left my pin-ups behind, having decided that
they only made matters worse. This was a mistake; being quite a good
artist in a rather specialized way, I started to draw my own, and it
wasn't long before I had a collection it would be hard to match on any
respectable planet.
I would hate you to think that this preoccupation affected my
efficiency as a unit of the Galactic Survey. It was only on the long,
dull runs between the stars, when I had no one to talk to but the
computer, that I found my glands getting the better of me. Max, my
electronic colleague, was good enough company in the ordinary course of
events, but there are some things that a machine can't be expected to
understand. I often hurt his feelings when I was in one of my
irritable moods and lost my temper for no apparent reason.
"What's the matter, Joe?" Max would say plaintively.
"Surely you're not mad at me because I beat you at chess again?
Remember, I warned you I would."
"Oh, go to help" snarl back and then I'd have an anxious five minutes
while I straightened things out with the rather literal-minded
Navigation Robot.
Two months out from Base, with thirty suns and four solar systems
logged, something happened that wiped all my personal problems from my
mind.
The long-range monitor began to beep; a faint signal was coming from
somewhere in the section of space ahead of me. I got the most accurate
bearing that I could; the transmission was unmodulated, very narrow
band clearly a beacon of some kind. Yet no ship of ours, to the best
of my knowledge, had ever entered this remote neck of the universe; I
was supposed to be scouting completely unexplored territory.
This, I told myself, is IT my big moment, the payoff for all the lonely
years I'd spent in space. At some unknown distance ahead of me was
another civilisation a race sufficiently advanced to possess
hyper-radio.
I knew exactly what I had to do. As soon as Max had confirmed my
readings and made his analysis, I launched a message carrier back to
Base. If anything happened to me, the Survey would know where and
could guess why. It was some consolation to think that if I didn't
come home on schedule, my friends would-be out here in force to pick up
the pieces.
Soon there was no doubt where the signal was coming from, and I changed
course for the small yellow star that was dead in line with the
beacon.
No one, I told myself, would put out a wave this strong unless they had
space travel themselves, I might be running into a culture as advanced
as my own with all that that implied.
I was still a long way off when I started calling, not very hopefully,
with my own transmitter. To my surprise, there was a prompt reaction.
The continuous wave immediately broke up into a string of pulses,
repeated over and over again.
Even Max couldn't make anything of the message, it probably meant "Who
the heck are you?" which was not a big enough sample for even the most
intelligent of translating machines to get its teeth into.
Hour by hour the signal grew in strength; just to let them know I was
still around and was reading them loud and clear, I occasionally shot
the same message back along the way it had come. And then I had my
second big surprise.
I had expected them whoever or whatever they might be to switch to
speech transmission as soon as I was near enough for good reception.
This was precisely what they did; what I had not expected was that
their voices would be human, the language they spoke an unmistakable
but to me unintelligible brand of English. I could identify about one
word in ten; the others were either quite unknown or else distorted so
badly that I could not recognize them.
When the first words came over the loudspeaker, I guessed the truth.
This was no alien, nonhuman race, but something almost as exciting and
perhaps a good deal safer as far as a solitary scout was concerned. I
had established contact with one of the lost colonies of the First
Empire the pioneers who had set out from Earth in the early days of
interstellar exploration, five thousand years ago. When the empire
collapsed, most of these isolated groups had perished or had sunk back
to barbarism. Here, it seemed, was one that had survived.
I talked back to them in the slowest and simplest English I could
muster, but five thousand years is a long time in the life of any
language and no real communication was possible. They were clearly
excited at the contact pleasurably, as far as I could judge. This is
not always the case; some of the isolated cultures left over from the
First Empire have become violently xenophobia and react almost with
hysteria to the knowledge that they are not alone in space.
Our attempts to communicate were not making much progress, when a new
factor appeared one that changed my outlook abruptly. A woman's voice
started to come from the speaker.
It was the most beautiful voice I'd ever heard, and even without the
lonely weeks in space that lay behind me I think I would have fallen in
love with it at once. Very deep, yet still completely feminine, it had
a warm, caressing quality that seemed to ravish all my senses. I was
so stunned, in fact, that it was several minutes before I realized that
I could understand what my invisible enchantress was saying. She was
speaking English that was almost fifty per cent comprehensible.
To cut a short story shorter, it did not take me very long to learn
that her name was Liala, and that she was the only philologist on her
planet to speciali se in Primitive English. As soon as contact had
been made with my ship, she had been called in to do the translating.
Luck, it seemed, was very much on my side; the interpreter could so
easily have been some ancient, white-bearded fossil.
As the hours ticked away and her sun grew ever larger in the sky ahead
of me, Liala and I became the best of friends. Because time was short,
I had to operate faster than I'd ever done before. The fact that no
one else could understand exactly what we were saying to each other
insured our privacy.
Indeed, Liala's own knowledge of English was sufficiently imperfect for
me to get away with some outrageous remarks; there's no danger of going
too far with a girl who'll give you the benefit of the doubt by
deciding you couldn't possibly have meant what she thought you said....
Need I say that I felt very, very happy? It looked as if my official
and personal interests were neatly coinciding. There was, however,
just one slight worry. So far, I had not seen Liala. What if she
turned out to be absolutely hideous?
My first chance of settling that important question came six hours from
planet-fall. Now I was near enough to pick up video transmissions, and
it took Max only a few seconds to analyze the incoming signals and
adjust the ship's receiver accordingly. At last I could have my first
close-ups of the approaching planet and of Liala
She was almost as beautiful as her voice. I stared at the screen,
unable to speak, for timeless seconds.
Presently she broke the silence.
"What's the matter?" she asked.
"Haven't you ever seen a girl before?"
I had to admit that I'd seen two or even three, but never one like her.
It was a great relief to find that her reaction to me was quite
favorable, so it seemed that nothing stood in the way of our future
happiness if we could evade the army of scientists and politicians who
would surround me as soon as I landed. Our hopes of privacy were very
slender; so much so, in fact, that I felt tempted to break one of my
most ironclad rules.
I'd even consider marrying Liala if that was the only way we could
arrange matters. (Yes, that two months in space had really put a
strain on my system....)
Five thousand years of history ten thousand, if you count mine as well
can't be condensed easily into a few hours. But with such a delightful
tutor, I absorbed knowledge fast, and everything I missed, Max got down
in his infallible memory circuits.
Arcady, as their planet was charmingly called, had been at the very
frontier of interstellar colonisation; when the tide of empire had
retreated, it had been left high and dry. In the struggle to survive,
the Arcadians had lost much of their Original scientific knowledge,
including the secret of the Star Drive. They could not escape from
their own solar system, but they had little incentive to do so. Arcady
was a fertile world and the low gravity only a quarter of Earth's had
given the colonists the physical strength they needed to make it live
up to its name. Even allowing for any natural bias on Liala's part, it
sounded a very attractive place.
Arcady's little yellow sun was already showing a visible disk when I
had my brilliant idea. That reception committee had been worrying me,
and I suddenly realized how I could keep it at bay.
The plan would need Liala's co-operation, but by this time that was
assured. If I may say so without sounding too immodest, I have always
had a way with women, and this was not my first courtship by TV.
So the Arcadians learned, about two hours before I was due to land,
that survey scouts were very shy and suspicious creatures. Owing to
previous sad experiences with unfriendly cultures, I politely refused
to walk like a fly into their parlor. As there was only one of me, I
preferred to meet only one of them, in some isolated spot to be
mutually selected. If that meeting went well, I would then fly to the
capital city; if not I'd head back the way I came. I hoped that they
would not think this behavior discourteous, but I
was a lonely traveler a long way from home, and as reasonable people, I
was sure they'd see my point of view.... They did. The choice of the
emissary was obvious, and Liala promptly became a world heroine by
bravely volunteering to meet the monster from space. She'd radio back,
she told her anxious friends, within an hour of coming aboard my ship.
I tried to make it two hours, but she said that might be overdoing it,
and nasty-minded people might start to talk.
The ship was coming down through the Arcadian atmosphere when I
suddenly remembered my compromising pinups, and had to make a rapid
spring-cleaning. (Even so, one rather explicit masterpiece slipped
down behind a chart rack and caused me acute embarrassment when it was
discovered by the maintenance crew months later.) When I got back to
the control room, the vision screen showed the empty, open plain at the
very center of which Liala was waiting for me; in two minutes, I would
hold her in my arms, be able to drink the fragrance of her hair, feel
her body yield in all the right places
I didn't bother to watch the landing, for I could rely on Max to do his
usual flawless job. Instead, I hurried down to the air lock and waited
with what patience I could muster for the opening of the doors that
barred me from Liala.
It seemed an age before Max completed the routine air check and gave
the "Outer Door Opening" signal. I was through the exit before the
metal disk had finished moving, and stood at last on the rich soil of
Arcady.
I remembered that I weighed only forty pounds here, so I moved with
caution despite my eagerness. Yet I'd forgotten, living in my fool's
paradise, what a fractional gravity could do to the human body in the
course of two hundred generations. On a small planet, evolution can do
a lot in five thousand years.
Liala was waiting for me, and she was as lovely as her picture. There
was, however, one trifling matter that the TV screen hadn't told mcI've
never liked big girls, and I like them even less now. If I'd still
wanted to, I suppose I could have embraced Liala. But I'd have looked
like such a fool, standing there on tiptoe with my arms wrapped around
her knees.